Categories:

Good Vibrations Ensure Quality Water

With mining towns often located far from civilisation, providing quality water for residents can be a challenge.

In some instances the solution might be to use groundwater, though companies face high costs when replacing pipework and infrastructure due to scale.

Hydrosmart is a physical water treatment system that breaks the bonds between minerals in solution and progressively unblocks pipes and infrastructure using resonance frequencies.

Non-ferrous pipe sections wrapped with coils are placed into an existing system, and a computer controlling the coils generates electrical fields which are frequency-modulated with respect to polarity. These pass through the pipe into the mineralised water, breaking mineral bonds and hydrating and dissolving build-up and scale.

“We had an instance where chemicals were being used for dewatering at a gold mine that handled two megalitres of water in its system per day,” Mr Pearce said.

“The 110mm pipe, which carried a mineral load of 29,000 parts per million, was scaled to a thickness of 15mm. Chemicals weren’t doing the job and scaling was getting worse.

“The supervisor reported installation of a Hydrosmart system not only prevented any additional build-up of scale, but actually removed the existing 15mm of scale such that the pipe was back to a bare black poly pipe.”

Hydrosmart can also be used for minerals processing.

An example is a commercial heap-leach mining operation where crushed heaps were irrigated with a cyanide solution to leach silver into solution.

The process recycled bore water in the silver leaching circuit and consumed anti-scaling chemicals. It was found that use of anti-scaling chemicals could be reduced or eliminated by installing Hydrosmart to treat the process water for irrigation of the heaps.

In practice, this stopped calcium gypsum build-up from forming in the pipes and sprinkler heads during the recovery process.

The Hydrosmart system installed to remove scale gypsum at an African gold mine.